A $4 billion dollar war chest. What ever will Larimer do with all that money?
As of writing this, Block.one, the developer of EOS, will finish up its year-long ICO experiment, on June 1, 2018 at 22:59:59 UTC, having raised over $4 billion from investors.
Why did they choose to run an ICO for a whole year?
The official statement from Block.one was to provide sufficient enough period for people to participate in the ICO if they choose to. This novel method contrasts with the vast majority of token distribution events which have a small window of opportunity and typically only allow a small number of investor participation due to their finite timeframe.
Additionally, the Block.one team wanted to prove themselves by providing investors, would be investors and armchair pundits the opportunity to view their ongoing development of the EOS.io software and milestones achieved throughout the year.
It was hoped that by bringing the world in on their journey, people could decide for themselves of the merits in supporting the ICO.
This experiment could have actually gone either way; out-of-this-world-amazing or died a horrible gruesome death.
Fortunately for Block.one it went rather well.
From the outset, Block.one would have had no knowledge of how much their ICO would ultimately raise as they placed their fate in the hands of the Free Market. Furthermore, as the length of the ICO was coded into an Ethereum smart contract and therefore written on the blockchain; it was final and could not have been changed, regardless of outcome.
So,what does EOS do again?
EOS.IO software is aiming to provide a decentralized operating system which can support thousands of industrial scale DApps by enabling vertical and horizontal scaling.
Scalability. Flexibility. Usability…Satoshi would have been so proud.
Their software provides accounts, authentication, databases, asynchronous communication and the scheduling of applications across multiple CPU cores and/or clusters.
The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications.
In other words, an Ethereum killer…and what has Vitalik got say about all this?
Well, you can read it all for yourself, here.
…and Larimer’s response to Vitalik? I thought you’d never ask!(here)
…and finally, Vitalik’s rebuttal of Dan.(here)
They’ve got a gazillion dollars, so what?
Well, here’s the issue, they haven’t actually disclosed what they are going to use the funds for.
On EOS.io, the official statement reads like a politely worded disclaimer:
“As a private company, proceeds of the EOS Token distribution will be utilized by block.one in its sole discretion. block.one intends to use certain of the proceeds for general administration and operating expenses, as well as to build a blockchain consulting business focusing on helping businesses re-imagine or build their businesses on the blockchain, developing more open source software that may be helpful to the community and building decentralized applications using EOS.IO Software…blah, blah, blah.”
In other words, We will do whatever We want to.
What future awaits EOS, it’s team and all its investors?
Are we staring down another Tezos debacle?
Will Larimer stay on given his history of being a builder of ideas but not so much a maintainer of things? (Larimer left Bitshares and Steem)
Was Qihoo 360’s recently discovered vulnerability of “epic proportions” that could have derailed EOS’ planned mainnet launch an ominous sign? (Update: this vulnerability has since been quickly rectified by the EOS development team)
Only time will tell. In the meantime, either trade it, hodl it or sit back watch it all unfold.
